Great work vs Meaningful work
Many companies in tech are doing great work but the question is how meaningful they are?
By meaningful, I mean it should be of some great help to the humanity. Alphafold is meaningful but tiktok is not. You may argue that it is upto the user that what he is interested in. But, before launching such creations, one should do thorough analysis to see whether it will of meaningful use to people in the long run or not with the same spirit they do their financial projections. You should take care of the part where it can cause harm to the world.
I always felt personalization is a meaningful task. There comes a lot of responsibility with it. But whether it is meaningful or not depends on the objective the system is trained on.
After college, I have decided to join any company such that I can get to work on machine learning. Because, I loved it since I was introduced to ML. I was just blown away by the fact that machine can learn and predict whether an image contains cat or dog.
I am very fortunate to have associated with talented people. But, now I feel that along with ML, I should make sure that the next company have good culture and it must do meaningful work.
Working on meaningful things will give you satisfaction, integrity, natural intensity. But you need to bring in intelligence.
If the company is doing meaningful work which the world will appreciate in the long run is many times better than running behind money and joining just great companies in the short term.
But, I have to sustain myself too. Convince friends and family. I have plans of even creating something of my own on weekends and pivot to entirely meaningful work. Let's see if I can pull it off in this lifetime.